In the U.S., they meter gas by the “therm,” which is defined as 100,000 BTUs. It’s a misconception that it’s equal to 100 cubic feet of natural gas at standard temperature and pressure, and is merely a coincidence that those values are very close.

BTUs are like a shitty imperial calorie, the energy it takes to heat up one pound of water by one degree fahrenheit.

Also, don’t confuse therms for thermies, a totally different unit that means the amount of energy required to heat up a tonne (1000 kg) (not to be confused with the imperial ton that is 2000 pounds) of water by 1°C.

Energy is so useful in so many different contexts that we can just always expect a million ways to express it.

It’s pretty common to use acre inches and acre foot as a unit of volume for measuring water in agriculture, water use, flood mitigation, etc.

So if we can use area height as a volumetric unit, by not volume/area as a height unit?

Unless you’re converting seconds to minutes, hours, days, years, etc.

Then you get things like watt hours. Or light years.

In static electric fields, sure. But the real world has rapidly changing electric fields, and mapping concepts like voltage or resistance to a time dimension starts to require imaginary numbers (and the complex analogue to resistance goes by a different name of impedance). And once you’re modeling electricity through those concepts, you can have high current in a particular moment in time where the voltage might not be high. Or where the implied voltage is very high but was actually more of an effect than a cause.

In other words, if you’re simply talking about “resistance,” you’re already in the wrong domain to be analyzing electrical safety properly.

Voltage and current are related, of course, but Ohm’s law is just a simplification of circuit theory for static circuits, and the version most are taught early on assume zero inductance and zero capacitance in the circuit. Drop in an alternating current, some capacitors and inductors, and you’ve got yourself a more complex situation, literally, with the scalar real number representing resistance replaced with the complex number representing impedance.

And when you have time variance that isn’t a simple sinusoidal wave of electric potential coming from a source, even the definition of the word “voltage” starts requiring vector calculus to even be a coherent definition.

So when I take a simple battery of DC cells to create a low voltage power source, I can still induce current using some transformers and inductors (which store energy in magnetic field) and abruptly breaking open the circuit so that the current still arcs across high resistance air. That’s the basic principle of how a spark plug works. In those cases, you’re creating immense voltages for a tiny amount of time, but there’s never any real risk of significant current being pushed through any part of a person’s body. And as soon as you draw off some of the current, the voltage immediately drops as you deplete the stored energy wherever it is in the system.

And anything designed to deliver an electric shock to a person (or animal) tends to be high voltage, low current. Tasers, electric fences, etc.

So it’s current that matters for safety. A high voltage doesn’t always induce a high current. And current can cause problems even at relatively low voltages.

At the same time, if a bank goes under, that means they owe more than they own, so “ownership” of that entity is basically worthless. In those cases, a bailout of the customers does nothing for the owners, because the owners still get wiped out.

The GM bailout in 2009 also involved wiping out all the shareholders, the government taking ownership of the new company, and the government spinning off the newly issued stock.

AIG required the company basically issue new stock to dilute owners down to 20% of the company, while the government owned the other 80%, and the government made a big profit when they exited that transaction and sold the stock off to the public.

So it’s not super unusual. Government can take ownership of companies as a condition of a bailout. What we generally don’t necessarily want is the government owning a company long term, because there’s some conflict of interest between its role as regulator and its interest as a shareholder.

The state of passenger rail in the United States on lines that don’t serve New York City is pretty pathetic, so I’d think that an increase in the number of New York passengers, by itself, would actually represent a significant increase in the total number of passengers, nationally.

and the seats were only a little bit bigger than economy flight seats

I find them to be much larger, comparable to business class on an airplane. It’s much, much easier for me to get work done on a laptop (or eat a meal) on an Amtrak train than on economy seats, or even economy plus seats. Plus having a lot more aisle space to walk around is huge.

The CEO is just saying “people want to take the train”. Oh, really? That’s what you think, guy who stands to profit if people take the train?

It’s not the CEO, it’s the chair of the board of directors. Amtrak is government chartered and majority owned by the US government, and its board of directors are appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate, essentially making it a government position.

And it’s two paragraphs out of like 10, where several other experts were interviewed and quoted.

I have my beef with Newsweek, but your criticism here misses the mark.

there was a $10k bounty,

$60k. $10k from NYPD and $50k from the FBI.

Yeah, a nuclear blast is gonna be totally deadly within a particular radius, no matter what you do. And then at some larger radius, everything outside that radius will be safe, regardless of what you do. So the area in between is going to be the area where the response can make a difference.

And as you mention, the area of the “can actually make a difference” zone is much larger than the “dead-no-matter-what” zone, because it scales by the square of the distance. So if the outer safe radius is twice the inner death radius, the area of the in between zone is gonna be about 3 times the size of the death zone (π(2r)^2 - πr^2 = 3πr). If it’s 3 times the radius, it’ll be 8 times the area.

There’s no legitimate reason to intentionally take losses (or refuse to take revenue) for tax reasons, though.

If you lose $1000 and get a tax benefit worth $200 on those losses, it’s still a net loss of $800, so you should rather get at least some money back. Getting $500 back might mean that you lose $500 and then get $100 back in tax benefits, so that your net loss is $400 instead. That’s an improvement over losing $800, so it’s worth doing.

More likely, the contracts around the movie had them needing to pay rightsholders, actors/writers/directors, and producers based on certain formulas on the gross revenue, or would be contractually obligated to spend a minimum on marketing and promotion if there was going to be a release, etc.

Taxes just alleviate the degree of losses (or reduce the amount of profit), which can change behavior around risk taking, but it wouldn’t make sense to abandon a finished movie solely for tax reasons.

Figuring out grid scale storage isn’t easy, but the good thing about it is that you can figure out storage at slightly smaller scales to alleviate the problem somewhat, and build on that success to try to get to daily storage to meet nighttime demand, then up to weekly storage to handle fluctuations in weather, and maybe even seasonal storage to deal with seasonal variation in both supply and demand.

But storage doesn’t have to just be chemical batteries, either. Some can be demand shifting, like desalination or water pumping based on excess power supply. Maybe even intermittently powering direct air capture of CO2 if there’s so much excess energy they don’t know what to do with it. Some can be storage of heat, whether really hot like molten salt that can run turbines for dispatchable electricity, or just at the residential scale with a bunch of distributed hot water tanks, or everything in between. There are also some storage technologies relying on gravity (pumped hydro if the geography supports it), compressed air, flywheels (could be important for maintaining grid inertia for stability).

And there’s always curtailment, where you just don’t generate the power, and turn off some the panels in the middle of the day.

Also, Relevant Username?

Probably. I don’t even know how I came up with this, but I do love me some logic.

Sometimes 1+1 is 2, like when you’re counting stuff.

Sometimes 1+1 is 1, like when you just need a Boolean indicator of whether something is true. Pressing the elevator button multiple times should behave the same way as pressing the elevator button once. Planning out a delivery route requires a stop at every place with at least one item to be delivered, but the route itself doesn’t change when a second or third item is added to that stop.

Sometimes 1+1 is 0, like when dealing with certain types of rotations, toggle switches, etc. Doing a 180° rotation twice is the same as doing it zero times. Same with doing a reflection transformation twice.

A good engineer understands the scope of what they’re doing, and its limits.

Contracts can be modified by the bankruptcy code.

In 11 U.S.C. § 365(f)(1):

Except as provided in subsections (b) and © of this section, notwithstanding a provision in an executory contract or unexpired lease of the debtor, or in applicable law, that prohibits, restricts, or conditions the assignment of such contract or lease, the trustee may assign such contract or lease under paragraph (2) of this subsection.

So any continuing contract in which there are obligations on both sides, such as a premium account where the accountholder pays a fee and the service provider continues providing access to the service, is assignable in a bankruptcy, even if the contract itself says it’s not assignable.

There’s a few other bankruptcy principles at play, but that’s the main one that jumps out at me.

There’s also a classic case where the bankruptcy trustee can sell a bankruptcy debtor’s Pittsburgh Steelers season tickets, including the right to renew for the next year on the same terms as all other season tickets holders. Just because the season tickets are revocable by contract doesn’t mean that the team has the right to exercise that revocation against a bankruptcy debtor just because they don’t like what’s happening in the bankruptcy.

Oh, he knows. They took him on an airplane and made him eat food he had just called “poison” for a photo shoot.

He couldn’t say no, because of the implication.

The “what is a bank” question is complicated, so “fintechs” have been operating in areas that are in some gray areas in between “definitely a bank” versus “definitely not a bank.”

At the most informal, you’ve got things like a roommate who collects everyone’s fair share of rent before sending one payment to the landlord, or a parent who keeps track of their kids’ virtual balances of what the kids are allowed to spend. These definitely aren’t banks.

Then you’ve got things like short term balances between people who deal with each other: an employer who keeps track of hours and pays the employee at the end of the pay period, a retail customer who has some store credit from a returned item, a contractor who periodically invoices a customer for work performed, etc. Despite the “credit” and “balances,” these aren’t bank accounts.

Some gray areas get a little bit more complicated. You have airline mileage and hotel point programs where the miles/points can be used to purchase goods and services, including sometimes those not even being offered by the business where the miles were accumulated.

Then you get into banking-like structures that might be, or might not be banks. Is it banking when you buy something on a periodic payment plan? What about when you put down a deposit to reserve a preorder for something you expect to buy when that product is released? Or give someone a gift card for a specific store? Does it matter if these programs are administered by third parties separate from the buyer or seller?

Even things like Apple Cash or PayPal or Venmo or CashApp perform functions that can be bank-like, or not really bank-like.

Fintechs have looked at the constantly updated rules of what they can or can’t do before needing to comply with certain banking regulations, and usually try to avoid accidentally triggering certain rules. And the rules don’t divide into just bank versus not bank, as many of the rules apply to non-banks that do certain things, and many of the rules don’t apply to even banks that stay out of certain product lines. So it’s not a binary yes or no, but a series of complicated areas where some are yes and some are no.

The big problem, where this Synapse bankruptcy is hurting people, is when people worked with an entity that provides certain services, who relied on the back end on a middleman that provides other services, and then the middleman fails. People operating in the gray areas are exposing themselves to systemic risks they might not fully understand.

This isn’t about shareholders being wiped out. It’s about account holders of what they thought were bank accounts losing everything because their accounts were powered on the back end by a company they’d never heard of or directly dealt with.

These are supposed to have AI facial recognition for matching to government issued IDs, which just sounds like a huge attack surface (or even unintentional bugs).